


/Napper/

by padawanhilary



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Crime Scenes, Fights, M/M, Male Slash, Murder, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 11:01:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/padawanhilary/pseuds/padawanhilary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will is working on a different sort of case than he's dealt with in the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	/Napper/

**Author's Note:**

> _Napper_ is a French culinary term, meaning "to coat, mask, or cover." 
> 
> NC-17 for gore, violence, blood, disturbing imagery and graphic sex.
> 
> Many thanks go to SorchaR, who beta-read and who is right there with me in my Hannibal obsession.
> 
> Apologies for the formatting issues; it has been a very long time since I last posted here (or wrote, for that matter).

It’s a cold crime scene and a bad idea that Will’s here in the first place.

Will has never done this before, walked into a picked-over crime scene armed only with pictures and a gut feeling, but there are no puddles of blood or vomit, no skinned, mutilated or run-through bodies. Few odors, comparatively speaking, though someone not trained and brained in death would probably beg to differ. It isn’t only the lack of tangible (as opposed to mental) visuals that’s throwing him off. It’s that the house smells of old carpet and, faintly, decomposed bodies, but the usual thick stench of blood is noticeably and startlingly faint. Another tilt to the equilibrium is that he’s not here by Jack’s request, or even on his orders. Jack is unaware, so there’s no pressure, no one forcing him to look.

Will should find it a relief. He doesn’t. _He’s_ forcing him to look.

Hannibal’s reassurance was smooth, as warm as his words could be: “We will decide what to do when you remember.” The implication was that Will _would_ remember, that it was only a matter of time. The larger implication was that the decision to be made was a huge one. That’s where things get muddy. That's why Will is here without Jack, without Hannibal.

Will sits on the sofa in the living room of the sprawling ranch-style home. The couch itself is a pea-soup-green 1970s monster with double-stitched square cushions and a perfectly upholstered button dead in the middle of each. If he cared about such things, he might be mentally speculating on whether the sofa is harder to look at than bodies. He pulls a manila envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and scatters pictures onto the glass coffee table, the powder-blue shag carpet peeking between the horrific images. It is kind of an awful house.

There is a stain by the fireplace, not huge, smaller than a bread box. It lies there alone, apart from the others, and Will finds himself arranging the pictures to account for that. The one that corresponds with that stain goes at the end of the coffee table, the other five images about a foot away, laid out to correspond with the kitchen, the dining room. A puddle. Drag marks. Another, larger puddle. A splat of blood and brain on the curtains. Skid marks down the wall.

He’s tracked those, done his walk backward through the house, followed the events back into the darkness. The killer is over, has in fact already been bagged and tagged, though it gives him a twinge of something like professional guilt to think like that. Hannibal would probably not like the phrasing, though he may not openly protest.

> _”Hannibal,” Will murmured as he stared down at the image of himself. The sketch was impeccable, nearly photographic in its exactness, though Will had, of course, posed for neither photograph nor sketch. On the paper, he was naked and sprawled inelegantly in a chair, his expression sated and lazy. His cock lay flaccid against one thigh, and Will blushed hotly to realize how absolutely true the image was. “I...this...” He was too startled to filter his phrasing, not that there was much to filter. “Why?”_
> 
> _“Because that is what I saw in my mind,” Hannibal replied, calmly scenting from his snifter and then sipping. “I hope you do not give me cause to regret my admission, or my revelation of the sketch.”_
> 
> _Will looked up from the picture. His response, he would find within moments, gave Hannibal the answer he was looking for: “Are there others?”_

Hannibal is no longer Will’s therapist in the professional sense (though his keen interest in the inner workings of Will's brain has never abated), primarily because, although not much between them has changed, the one thing that has is substantial enough to preclude any further professional entanglement.

Will rubs his hand down his face, scrubbing hard at it to get Hannibal’s visage out from behind his eyes. He’d welcome it if this weren’t so important. Hannibal has managed to force out Garret Jacob Hobbs completely, obliterating many of the other visions in the process. Not all, just most. He never questioned why Hannibal’s face took the place of murderers, just accepted it with a kind of grateful exhaustion. It’s done enough good that Will felt he no longer needed to cling to Hannibal’s studied opinions of his sanity. That's actually fine with Will. But it isn’t that one substantial thing that’s preventing him from going to Hannibal with this.

No, it's even bigger than that, Will is afraid.

But those are all thoughts for another time. He shifts himself into more of a perch on the edge of the miserable sofa, half turning away from the kitchen and dining room photos to concentrate on the fireplace stain.

Eyes slide closed, a breath, slow and grounding, slides in. The pendulum wipes golden and black, erasing the pool of blood. The blow to the head. The struggle.

It’s when he moves forward from there, standing up to give himself greater focus, that he tilts again. The struggle is half-blank, like a dance with an invisible partner. Where is the victim? Not that the question needs an answer. He knows the victim, doesn’t need to see that face.

> _Hannibal’s mouth was warm and precise. Naturally, he kissed with purpose. There was nothing frenzied in their first encounter, no fumbling for buttons or groping of crotches. Hannibal’s hand was firm on Will’s throat, covering the quickening pulse and warm, creeping flush, and Will found it a comfort. He felt alive for once, _awake_ , not a shuffling sleepwalker afraid to dream. Hannibal could do so much to him with that hand right where it lay, and Will...Will found that he was alright with that. With anything. _

_He_ is the victim.

Ah, and there he is, on like a light switch. Not memory, not yet, just vision, but different than the other times he’s tried: Will’s own face, his startled, blinking eyes as he is pushed backward, a hand on his shoulder, one perfectly covering his throat. There’s a shove, then another. He sees, feels, hears his head striking twice against the rock hearth. The dance is over as soon as it’s partnered: Will doing the pushing, Will taking the blows until he slumps to the floor. He’d love to claim auditory and visual hallucination on this one. Would _love_ to, but no. It's just reconstruction.

_We will decide what to do when you remember._

Schizophrenic clarity makes Will move closer, entranced. The vision gets blinked away. He doesn’t remember this any more than he could say he remembers the instance of another victim’s death, and the clarity fades as another equilibrium-tilting idea occurs. The stain on the rock was mostly left alone, pretty self-explanatory, a piece of Will’s hair pulled out of the blood for DNA sampling and procedural blah, blah, blah. Will goes to the stain now, a dark splotch against quartz-streaked river stones (God, this really is an awful house). He approaches it as though it may startle and flee, his movements slow, cautious. The stain is clear, concise, a little...boring, as blood stains go. There’s no bone or brain like there is on the curtains, or he’d probably be dead.

Why _isn’t_ he dead?

> _Will moaned into the pillow, hands working uselessly as Hannibal opened him up. The lube was warm, unsurprisingly, the glove smooth and soft inside him, covering Hannibal’s fingers but not blunting them. He could feel every nuance, every intention: this movement, to stretch the muscle, that, for pure pleasure. Another finger, and another, and then Hannibal’s cock._

As he nears the offending hearth, he allows his focus to broaden, taking in the whole thing: the curves of stones, the rough, white mortar, the occasional glittering streak through the rock. He leans in, pressing his cheek to a smooth, larger stone, something compelling him to stare past the stain, above it, below it. The bubbly river-rock facade is almost comically bouncy in profile.

The police report described something very similar to Abigail’s encounter with a fleeing suspect. That one attacked Alana, then disappeared. This one attacked Will, tried to disappear, and was apparently shot the second he made for the fence outside the kitchen door. Easy as pie, Jack had said, probably a little too pleased with himself. The suspect had hidden right here, and it was his undoing: bagged and tagged. This time, Will lets himself hold that thought. That wording. It’s simple and clear. Too clear, like _almost_ all of this.

 __

>  _It was thick and strong, and Hannibal presented it without warning or request, feeding his erection into Will by degrees. Of course he would know without asking exactly how ready Will was. He would understand that Will was already overwhelmed, mentally and emotionally full up, and that was the reason Hannibal took him from behind, not quickly but efficiently enough to get the edge off without burying Will in too much sensation. Later, he would take Will more slowly, staring into his eyes, and later, in the shower by hand, and later still (Will was beginning to think that Hannibal was some kind of superhuman being with limitless stamina), Hannibal made it so that he could see that sketched image firsthand, in front of his eyes instead of inside his own head. To that end, he very patiently sucked Will off in the leather chair, a tea towel laid neatly under him to protect the knees of his fine silk slacks._

And then Will sees something he missed before and the room tilts again, almost dizzying now. He plucks it from the mortar below the ebon-red smear--well enough below it that it was missed, all the focus by the investigators given to the boring blood stain and hair sample. It’s a fiber. Minuscule, translucent, almost hairlike in itself.

“Silk,” Hannibal says, and Will all but jumps out of his skin. He turns to see the doctor there, hovering in the open doorway. Will would love to claim this as hallucination, too, would absolutely fucking _love_ to, but as often as he’s seen Hannibal in recent weeks without his actual, physical presence, Will knows this to be ice water-cold reality. Everything tilts again, and his knees go liquid. He sinks to the hearth, his eyes drawn to the stain on the floor.

Silk. He doesn’t bother to ask how Hannibal knows; that would be insulting, a prolonging of the dance they’re engaged in now, and useless. “It’s been here for weeks,” he says, still clutching it between two fingers. His gaze shifts from the stain to the fiber. “Evading everyone else. Waiting for me.”

“Yes.” Hannibal sketches a bow with his head. “I knew you would return, and I knew you would be exactly as persistent as you have been.”

There is no grounding breath now. The air has frozen in Will’s lungs, his eyes locking on Hannibal’s. “It explains why I’m not dead,” he says, his voice inadvertently casual as he holds the silk strand up. “It doesn’t explain why you did it.”

Hannibal’s expression is placid, and Will knows him just well enough to see the wheels turning. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. I hope that you will take it on faith that I did it to protect you.”

“You bashed my head against a rock to protect me.” Will hears himself releasing a huff of a laugh. “It seems a little...coarse, for you.” He drops the silk thread, steps on it, and just like that, it’s lost. The classiest, most modern thing in this house is now buried in swinger’s shag that’s coming up on forty years old.

“I was given no choice. But you are well, and that was my design.” Hannibal’s expression is exactly as serene as ever, though Will is pleased to note the flicker of approval at the obliteration of the only piece of evidence not in lockdown.

> _He stood again, smoothing his trousers and his shirt, patting elegantly at his mouth with his handkerchief. Will knew then that Hannibal was seeing before him exactly what he’d already rendered in soft graphite. His eyes, only his eyes, displayed calm satisfaction with the tableau. It made Will feel stunningly, deliciously used._

Will swallows. He feels as though the back-and-forth tilting has slid him to the edge of a precipice, and he can’t navigate his way back from it. “But you bashed my head against a rock...to protect me.” It’s less of a question now, and the screaming _why?_ behind it is going to get buried, he knows. He feels a little stupid for asking.

Hannibal steps closer and holds out a hand; Will takes it without hesitation and stands. “In time,” Hannibal says, “all will become clear, I am sure of it. And then we will decide what to do when you remember.”

“But that was it, wasn’t it? I...I know. I know it was you..” Will’s protest is weak and confused.

“You know that it was me because you found the clue I had left for you,” Hannibal corrects, his tone exceedingly patient. He goes to the coffee table and gathers up the photos, bundles them into the manila envelope, wipes a smudge from the glass with his handkerchief. “Remembrance has not yet returned to you.” He straightens and hands Will the envelope. “Trust me when I tell you that this is a good thing. It would be a lot to handle. For anyone,” he adds, and now his voice is almost kind. “Understand that I make no reference to any condition but your persistent tiredness.”

Suddenly that’s all Will knows. He is exhausted, and this was a mistake, everything he’s studied and learned in this house presenting as a blurred swirl of dangerous thinking. He nods in wiped-out defeat.

“Follow me home,” Hannibal suggests as they step outside and toward their cars. “I will take care of you.”

Will hears the dark undercurrent to the words, and his eyes close briefly as he shivers. It will be a long night, primarily because Hannibal’s idea of taking care of Will doesn’t have anything to do with sleep.

That’s just fine.


End file.
